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Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Multiple Parents in a “Brave New World”

This new world began not in the scientific laboratory, but in the minds and desires of men.

I.

Recently,
the California governor signed a law whereby children could legally have not
just two, but three parents at the same time. This is the fifth state, plus the
District of Columbia, to have such legislation. The law is proposed, naturally,
under the rubric of “helping the child,” of keeping him out of a foster home.
Whether giving a child two “parents” of the same sex is good for the child in
the first place is likewise not brought up. The bill was not clear about who
will have authority when there is a conflict among the three parents about some
course of family action. Will it require a unanimous vote or only a 2-1
majority?

Nor was
there argument over the dubious notion that a single person, or even a couple,
has an individual “right” to a child. The first question is not about a “right”
of a single person or of parents but of their duty to the good of a child. The
focus of our thinking on this issue should be on marriage and its nature.
Children are gifts, not results of “rights.” “Rights” look to something
supposedly inherently “due” to an individual—something that one can demand
others to provide. A man and a woman are free to marry each other. What
marriage is means that their relationship can result in a child. But the child
is his own being. He is not simply a “planned product” of parents with “rights”
to him. The child must be considered at all stages of his being to be for his
own good, to which parents are ordered. The parents’ good is a result, not a
cause, of this good.

The issue
behind the new law had to do with a lesbian couple who decided to have a child,
something they obviously knew they could not have by themselves. Needless to
say, they had, as such, some insurmountable difficulty in carrying out this
“intention.” Their relationship, such as it is, can never result in a child who
is the produce of their exchanges. They can only have a child by an “imitation”
of what a real marriage between a man and a woman is.